Aspects of the disclosure relate generally to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and, more particularly, to diffusion magnetic resonance data provided by an MRI scanner.
White matter injury is common in central nervous system (CNS) disorders and plays an important role in neurological dysfunctions in patients. Understanding the pathology of complex and heterogeneous central nervous system diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) has been greatly hampered by the dearth of histological specimens obtained serially during the disease. Clinicians are reluctant to perform invasive CNS biopsies on patients with white matter disorders, due to the potential injury to the patients.
The insight of CNS white matter neuropathology has been derived typically from occasional biopsies consisting of small tissue samples of unusual cases. Autopsy tissues have revealed important insights into CNS pathologies. However, autopsies usually derive from patients with end-stage disease and often have long postmortem delay artifacts due tissue degradation. It is therefore advantageous to have a noninvasive imaging tool to accurately quantify and better understand the chronic and non-fatal injury in CNS disease during the whole course of the individual patient.
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a commonly used MRI modality in CNS disease/injury diagnosis. However, the current use of DTI technique is not capable of resolving the complex underlying pathologies correctly, despite being considered better than other techniques.